Google improves voice search (again) for its mobile apps

Google GOOG is claiming better voice search on its Android and iOS mobile apps, thanks to a new approach to the artificial intelligence technique the company uses to power that capability. A blog post published on Thursday, authored by a handful of Google researchers, explains in technical detail how they pulled off the improvements, which include faster, more-accurate transcriptions and better voice recognition in noisy places. The boiled-down version is that Google switched its voice search system from one type of deep learning technique to another. In the old model, the system would analyze 10-millisecond snippets of audio and make predictions of words based on the sounds it recognized, regardless of the order in which they were uttered. The new model has a better memory, meaning it can consume larger…